A load of utility poles heads for the barrier island east on Route 37 in Toms River Thursday. / THOMAS P. COSTELLO/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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@dpwillis732

Gov. Chris Christie on Thursday praised the response by the state’s utilities, including Jersey Central Power & Light, to massive outages across New Jersey following Superstorm Sandy.

“The villain is this case is Hurricane Sandy,” Christie said.

On Thursday, JCP&L said about 93 percent of the 1.2 million customers affected by Hurricane Sandy have been restored, with the company forecasting that the remaining 149,000 would get electricity back by the end of the weekend.

The nor’easter left up to 12 inches of wet, heavy snow across central New Jersey, resulting in more than 120,000 additional power outages. The company estimated that those customers will get power back throughout next week.

About 1,600 linemen arrived in New Jersey on Thursday to join more than 5,000 line workers, with more expected Friday. Nearly 14,000 JCP&L employees, FirstEnergy workers, outside contractors and utility workers from around the country are working to restore power to the total 269,000 JCP&L customers affected by the two storms, the company said. FirstEnergy is JCP&L’s parent company.

“The nor’easter further complicates the situation,” said Charles E. Jones, senior vice president and president of FirstEnergy Utilities. “Our customers’ hardships are real and we will continue our massive restoration effort until all have their power restored.”

Fair Haven resident Barbara Lupon is one of those custoners facing hardships. She said she has been waiting for the power to come back to her Kemp Avenue neighborhood ever since Sandy struck. She called Fair Haven “the forgotten town.”

Trees are down. “The wires are all over the street,” Lupon said. “It’s freezing in the house.”

Christie made his comments during a briefing at the National Guard Armory in Somerset.

Asked about the performance of Jersey Central Power & Light, which was heavily criticized for its response to Hurricane Irene last year, Christie said the utility has done “significantly better” than it did during the last big storm.

JCP&L, the state’s second-biggest utility, was hit harder by both Sandy and by the nor’easter than the state’s largest utility, Public Service Electric & Gas, he said.

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“They drew the short straw on this one,” he said.

The governor said he believed the public has shown less frustration with the utilities’ response to Sandy than it did after Irene because customers had received much more information about restoration efforts. The governor required the utilities to post a timetable for their town-by-town restoration efforts.

But some local officials and customers have criticized the information, saying it was not specific enough for their communities.

Much of the frustration being expressed Wednesday was by customers who had lost power during Sandy, had it restored, then lost it again.

“You get kind of tired of this,” said John Monticello of Point Pleasant Beach, who drove to the oceanfront to see whether the 12-foot-high emergency piles of sand that public works crews had plowed to the water’s edge had held during the storm. (They did.)

“We lost power last week, just got it back for a day or two, and now we lost it again,” he said. “Every day it’s the same now: Turn on the gas burner for heat. Instant coffee. Use the iPad to find out what’s going on in the rest of the world.”